LANGUAGE AS LIBERATION

The Nobel laureate as professor.

Complementing studies of Morrison as a writer and an editor, this volume focuses on her courses on the American canon at Princeton, including teaching materials, course descriptions, lectures, and a syllabus. A helpful introduction and notes are provided by Morrison’s teaching colleague, Claudia Brodsky. Morrison aimed to guide students through close readings of 19th- and 20th-century American fiction “to discover what impact notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability have had on the literature.” How, she asks, has the concept of whiteness been “built/invented/produced,” and how has it served the literary imagination of white authors in their exploration of American identity? Among the works she discusses are Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Gordon Pym, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Garden of Eden, Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. Morrison reiterates in each lecture the uses that white authors make of the Africanist character, Africanist idiom, and Africanist narrative. Recurring themes include the surrogate self as enabler: that is, the use of Black people to aggrandize or explore the white self (here, Morrison notes that the enabling role of Africanism for men becomes disabling for women); the use of Black people to comment on the qualities and characteristics of non-Black people; blackness as a means by which chaos is negotiated through its association with anarchy, disorder, and illegality; and the use of race as a disguise for other types of divisions, such as class and gender.

Deeply insightful investigations of major works.